7 Ways Technology is Changing the Face of Treatment Centers

Author

mirketa

February 18, 2018

Technology has provided healthcare many breakthroughs in recent years and Salesforce has been at the forefront of that. So if this is the case why are most treatment centers still so far behind. Every day people are scouring the internet trying to find a great place to recover from the diseases of Mental Health and Addiction. It’s estimated that over 20 million Americans over the age of 12 have an addiction. Many treatment centers lack the basic tools needed to be able to serve these patients with the care they need. As a consulting partner for Salesforce, we have seen technology changing the face of Treatment Centers. Technology is providing treatment centers with the advanced tools needed to navigate the ever-changing landscape. We’re going to outline 7 ways that technology is changing the face of treatment centers.

The addition of a CRM or Patient Relationship Management platform to the contact center is the number one way to better serving your patients. We have seen organizations taking notes on note pads or using excel to track patient calls. This is a major problem, in my experience working in a very busy Contact Center even your very best admissions representative will miss a follow-up. Also in my experience, as a recovering alcoholic with almost 7 years of sobriety, I know that when I was ready to get help patience was not one of my strongest areas. So timely follow-ups and the ability to take a call from beginning to end without hanging up the phone has resulted in a 35% increase inpatient admissions based on case studies we have conducted.
The customization of the CRM to meet your specific business needs is one of the best ways to improve efficiency in big or small contact centers. With a CRM like Salesforce for example a treatment center would have the ability to fully customize their user experience. One of the greatest pitfalls of a new CRM roll-out is that the system is not designed around the specific business needs of a treatment center. Salesforce has the ability to be fully customized. Salesforce offers workflow and processes which can automate repetitive manual tasks, approvals, emails, and can even change or update fields automatically.
The integration of 3rd party systems is one of the greatest features from an ROI perspective. Salesforce provides easy integration with any system that exposing their APIs. We have integrated EMR systems with Salesforce so the contact center can easily send patient information directly into the EMR saving their reps 25% more time. We have integrated insurance verification systems with Salesforce providing a preliminary verification in seconds not hours, this has been a major help for being able to make quick decisions on weekends on whether a patient is insured for your care. We have also seen where integrating your billing system would give your Insurance team the ability to see how a policy reimbursed the facility providing the team the ability to make good business decisions. This is important for private firms who can only keep their doors open if they are getting paid for the services.
The integration of a marketing system such as Marketing Cloud or Google Analytics with Salesforce will provide your team with the information they need to be able to get the target the right potential patients. We all know without marketing effort nobody would know you existed. We have seen a decrease in CPA of almost 50% by tracking ad spend and ROI in an integrated system where you can track the patient’s journey from the first click to alumni status. Salesforce has marketing tools that would even allow you to analyze patient data and match it up to potential patients who are actively searching for treatment giving you a targeted approach to marketing.
The integration of an automated email marketing system has been shown to better serve the patient following treatment. We have set up systems like Pardot from Salesforce to be integrated with the CRM and these facilities are using the system to automated follow-ups to Alumnus. They send newsletters, Alumni events, sobriety tips, and outcome surveys combined with phone calls we have seen an increase in Alumni interaction of 32%. We have taken content and created a decision tree of emails and based the triggers on the actual actions the alumni take. For instance, if an Alumni needs help we can provide a button that alerts the contact center for the need to follow up. If someone is not interacting with the emails possibly that person too needs a phone call.
Salesforce provides a robust app store chock full of goodies you could use to enhance your system. We are a registered app builder and as such have a number of amazing apps. We recently released an app that when downloaded provides the treatment center with an EMR on the Salesforce platform, it also gives the treatment center the ability to communicate bed space through its bed availability feature and a transportation feature that allows the user to send pick up instructions to company drivers. We also recommend several other apps in our eBook.
One of the things that I felt took up away a lot of my valuable time was reporting. I spent countless hours building reports and inputting data into spreadsheets so that the stakeholders would have the information they needed to effectively run the treatment center. By utilizing Salesforce native report builder and custom dashboards we have built these in Salesforce and automated the system to send out the reports at the same time daily.

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